When I first started blogging, I remember reading a post on Steve Pavlina’s blog about how much traffic he was receiving. If I recall correctly it was around a million visitors a month, a huge number! I found myself wondering where all that traffic was coming from.
Today while I was doing my routine sifting of Analytics numbers from Psdtuts+, I thought it’d be interesting to analyse and share some of the statistics and trends we have been getting. So I’ve taken some screenshots and put it all together for your informational pleasure!
Does Twitter ACTUALLY drive traffic?
Lately you hear an awful lot about Twitter and its uses for startups, bloggers and marketers. For about 6 months now we’ve been progressively using Twitter more and more, both through my own @collis account and through the various Tuts+ accounts. So does Twitter merit the fuss?
Here’s a monthly graph of referral traffic from Twitter:
As you can see it’s looking pretty positive, with a very solid climb over the last few months. And don’t forget this is just traffic coming marked as Twitter referrals, there is a large portion of traffic from Twitter clients which gets marked as Direct Traffic (for more on this, read Yoast’s post on the subject). So it’s safe to say that those numbers could be doubled to get a realistic quantity.
Part of the reason behind this trend is that our Tuts+ Twitter accounts – such as @psdtuts – push links to every post we publish. In other words it acts as a sort of alternative to RSS for the sites. Add in ReTweets, other users, our general Twitter marketing and you have a pretty good source of traffic by anyone’s estimation.
What about Facebook?
This one was more of a surprise to me because we don’t actually do anything with Facebook (yet). So to find out that Facebook is following pretty much the same traffic trend as Twitter was very interesting. In fact seeing this graph has spurred me to start organizing a genuine Facebook strategy for Envato. In the meanwhile I haven’t the faintest clue how Facebook is producing the traffic, just that it’s coming!
Digg vs StumbleUpon vs Reddit vs Foreign Social Media
For the longest time I used to focus a large amount of energy on Digg traffic. When it comes, it’s a real rush of visitors, and to be fair Digg really helped get many of our sites going, but have a look at this graph of Digg traffic over the years:
And compare it to StumbleUpon traffic:
StumbleUpon has actually sent double the traffic and it’s done so in a much more consistent manner. Add to that the fact that a lot of that Digg traffic took effort – running Digg campaigns, experimenting with widgets, growing a Digg account to submit with, networking with top Diggers, and so on.
We recently had the good fortune to land on Reddit’s homepage, something which I’d never seen the effects of before and I was pleasantly surprised to see traffic rivaling a Digg homepage – close to 40,000 visitors in a day. The thing I like about Reddit is that it’s much easier to get small amounts of traffic with an only slightly popular entry, whereas Digg by comparison is really an all or nothing traffic monster. Here’s the Reddit graph:
In terms of other social media, Delicious sends a fairly consistent stream of traffic – about 5,000 to 15,000 visitors a month. It spikes when a post goes on to the popular page, but even on a regular day seems to send a good 100-150 visitors, presumably from people accessing their bookmarks.
However the surprise (for me at least) entry in social media has to be foreign social sites. A good example of what I’m talking about is Wykop.pl, a Polish site:
And there are others too, one that springs to mind is meneame.net which one day suddenly sent 4,000 people.
Search Traffic
While social media is a great source of traffic, nothing beats search. It’s such a steady deliverer of visitors, have a look at this graph:
How does search traffic break down by search engine?
Google: 2,400,000 Visitors
Yahoo: 66,000
Live + MSN: 20,000
… Altavista: 500
What happened to Altavista! I still remember when it was the big engine that everyone used. Oh how the mighty have fallen. I’d imagine breakdown by search engine differs for niches and countries. Celebrity blogs no doubt have a much higher Yahoo percentage, as would sites in places like Japan and Russia where Google isn’t so dominant.
Another interesting thing about search is that when I look through the keywords people use, about 1/3 of all search traffic is for a variation of the site’s name – Psdtuts, Psdtuts.com, Psd+tuts, Psdtut and so on. So really these people are actually Direct Traffic – they just use Google as their address bar!
Search vs Direct vs Referral
Examining the overall breakdown of traffic into Search, Direct and Referral traffic reveals that Referrals win hands down bringing in almost 60% of all visitors. This breakdown differs with different types of sites. I’ve noticed that our marketplaces for example tend to weigh more towards search while a service site like FaveUp leans most heavily towards Direct traffic.
Referrals for Psdtuts+ come from such a huge range of sites that it’s hard to draw any real conclusions. We get a lot of traffic from tutorial aggregators, but that’s very niche specific. We also get traffic from a lot of blogs that do roundups of tutorials that themselves make it on Digg and StumbleUpon.
Proving that it’s always fascinating to look at stats, I discovered that one of our highest referrers is a site with a name rather similar to my own – Coliss.com which appears to be a blog in Japanese (I think).
Still More Traffic Analysis via Problogger
A few months ago Darren Rowse of Problogger posted an in-depth analysis of traffic to his Digital-Photography-School blog which is a fascinating read. And if that’s not enough, also check out The Day 250,000 People Showed Up at My Blog.
Collis,
The breakdown of where traffic is coming from makes for a very interesting read. I am starting to experience how Twitter can drive traffic with my account @WPlimits. Though that is on a much smaller scale.
Has the recent domain changes on the Tuts+ sites affected traffic at all?
I connected our nettuts+ twitter account to Facebook a long time ago. It basically repeats all of my tweets on the nettuts+ facebook page. That might explain some of the traffic.
Very interesting read. Looking forward to the new Facebook initiative.
Great read. I wish I could get that many pageviews
Great read! It’s really interesting to see where all these large sites get their visitors from. I wonder how long these trends will stay like this before something new will come out or we have to go back to the old SEO opt techniques.
Hopefully Twitter is here to stay as it’s a great thing to have.
@Keith same
Great post! I really enjoyed reading it and seeing these numbers on such a large scale. I was really interested to see all of the StumbleUpon traffic and its consistency; I didn’t expect those large of numbers.
Also, awesome to see the steady growth of search traffic. Search also was by far the most valuable with only a 50% bounce rate and an avg of 4 page views per visit. You really can’t beat that! The search results are something that I frequently preach and why the longtail of a successful blog post can usually surpass the initial bump from social media: http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/the-long-lifespan-of-a-successful-blog-post
Great article, thanks for sharing this data, it’s extremely useful and interesting.
Your facebook traffic is most likely coming from people that are posting a link to share. People either reading their feed or profile are then clicking the link. At least that’s my best guess
@Nathan: So far the domain switch seems to have had no effect – except for a bit of a boost in traffic from the launch posts / tweets about it. I was a bit worried it’d drop off but we have 301 redirects throughout the old domains to make sure we don’t lose anyone, I guess that’s holding it up.
@Jeffrey: That helps explain some of the facebook traffic. I guess there might be some other similar setups. I also pipe my tweets into facebook – though i suspect there are a lot of high school friends who see them and think wtf is this guy talking about
Very, very interesting. I’d be really curious to see if these trends hold true across many different industries.
Collis,
I think there’s a way you could get at least a somewhat better idea of the Twitter traffic. If you were to add a variable to all the urls that you seed to your Twitter accounts, something like thenetsetter.com/blog/some-post?source=twitter, you could then look at that in your content view. Clearly not the best solution, as it won’t integrate with the other analytics categories and such, but it could at least give you a rough idea.
Fantastic post, Collis. Thanks heaps for providing these insights and sharing the snippets of data
Really awsome insight Collis, thank you so much for opening this up to the world! I can only dream what it might be like to run a site that’s visited that much!
Great read, fantastic post.
Thanks Collis!
Great post, I’d be interested in your browser breakdown if you don’t mind posting it.
Interesting question @cancel-bubble, I haven’t looked for a while, just checked and in the last month:
58% – Firefox 3
14% – IE7
10% – Safari
5% – IE6
5% – Opera
4% – Chrome
2% – Firefox 2
0.5% – IE8
Pretty amazing how dominant FF3 is! But I guess this is a designer’s site!
@Collis: Wow, Firefox is dominant. But 5% still use IE6? That’s pretty sad.
It looks like Coliss.com is the Japanese version of Creattica. Are you sure you’re not running it?
@Collis and @Keith.
That is sad and surprising! Does NETTUTS have the same amount of IE6 visitors?
@collis: what about the pageviews and all details about PSDTUTS.COM!
what about psdtuts traffic details collis???????? )
Collis,
Nice to see traffic of a large blog ( that actually works ).
Thanks!
Bit late, but wanted to add my thanks for sharing the data Collis
The bounce rates from the social media sites are very interesting, and again appear to be a case where StumbleUpon has done very well for you – large amount of consistent traffic at just 58% bounce rate! Compare that to the very fickle Digg (~82%) and Reddit (92%!) traffic and it looks even better. Search is muddied a bit by the pseudo-direct traffic, and while it performs well, it’s surprising it accounts for a comparatively small slice of the pie (<=10% probably after accounting for the ‘direct’ users).
I’m launching a big blog redesign in a week or so, and I have to say being able to really thoroughly dig into the Google Analytics data is such a boon – being able to cut through preconceived ideas with hard data is always a good thing, you learn so much & the project benefits immensely
Hmm, very cognitive post.
Is this theme good unough for the Digg?
Good post! It seems we no longer have to worry about the Digg effect…. maybe the Twitter Effect?
Im starting a blog, i hope i could get that traffic too
Always nice to see some behind the scenes statistics for larger sites. Hoping to see some more posts list this one in the future
Thanks so much for sharing these graphs. It really helps to see what’s working for you and what isn’t.
Traffic from Polish Wykop.pl can be easily explained – here in Poland there is no good website on design and development, and since TUTS+ is popular enough, so…
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